Biometrically-Responsive Architecture: Mapping Biometric Data to Dynamic Spatial Change

This paper reports on a project to use biometric data from human bodies to dynamically transform the thermal, visual, acoustic and olfactory experience of architectural space. Combining methods from both Architecture and Interaction Design, the project’s goal is to enable new kinds of body-space interactions triggered by biometric data. By documenting the development and testing of a series of prototypes —a petal structure that compresses and expands a room, an array of conic elements that modulates light, and finally a personal enclosure with changing sensory properties— the paper suggests an area of design research and practice we term “biometrically-responsive architecture,” or simply “biometric architecture,” linking architectural spaces and the human body in novel ways.